Stephen C. Satterly, II – Author

By Stephen Satterly, School Transportation News, April 25, 2013

A young boy gets on your school bus, carrying a guitar case. He seems quieter than usual, as you say, “Hi,” to him as he boards. He puts his head down and walks down the aisle as if he knows what to expect. As he passes a group of students in the back of the bus, they jostle him, one of them tousles his hair, and they laugh at him. He sits down, his head bowed for a second, when suddenly he stands up with a pump shotgun.

He racks a round into the chamber, aims the shotgun at the one who tousled his hair, and yells, “I am sick and tired of you messing with me!” If this happened on your bus, what would you do?

For transportation directors and supervisors everywhere, this is an important question that leads to even more important ones. Is there a correct answer? If so, how can we train our bus drivers to arrive at the correct answer, and where do we find the time to conduct the training?

To be effective and to prevent liability issues, the training should be based on solid research on how the human mind actually works during a crisis.

Enter The First 30 Seconds

“The First 30 Seconds” is a DVD-based training program developed by Safe Havens International, the world’s leading non-profit school safety organization. The four-disc set contains an instructional disc, a documents disc, a scenario disc, and an evaluation disc. My school district uses both the Pupil Transportation and School Staff sets. There is also a Special Needs Staff set.

The First 30 Seconds” is based upon the research of Dr. Gary Klein, as summarized in his book “Sources of Power: How People Make Decisions” (Klein, 1998) and expounded upon in another Klein book, “Naturalistic Decision-Making” (Klein, 2008). This research shows how various professions made decisions during a crisis — professions such as fire chiefs, fighter pilots, combat leaders, nurses in critical care units, and others.

His research found that the brains of people under duress move away from linear thinking and actually use a holistic approach called pattern-matching and recognition to arrive at a decision on a course of action. The subconscious will scan for a past action (pattern) similar to the present situation (matching), select one (recognition), and then run a scenario to see if it will work (mental simulation).

Thus, decision-making in a crisis is not like a flowchart but a scan-and-consider process that actually works more quickly and is more successful. It is an intuitive process, not a deductive one. If you have ever experienced the “life passing before your eyes” phenomenon, then you have experienced the conscious manifestation of the subconscious pattern-matching process.

How It Works

The key to teaching the Naturalistic Decision-Making Process is developing a base of experience that a person can scan. This is done using short scenarios of less than a minute, and doing them on a regular basis.

The scenario at the beginning of this article is taken from “The First 30 Seconds.” You show the video clip, and then discuss with your drivers how they would respond. The Documents Disc contains discussion points for each scenario, as well as a worksheet for participants to take notes on the discussion. Drivers are asked to engage in mental simulation whenever they can.

The discussion for each scenario can be as brief or as long as you want. Therefore, it can be incorporated into any meeting or can be used as a stand-alone training.

Evaluation and Success

As a director or supervisor, you will want to occasionally check your drivers to see if they are using mental simulation and learning what they need to learn. The Evaluation Disc contains scenarios to show an individual driver, and there are scoring sheets that you may use to assess a driver’s response. This isn’t done to punish a driver, but to identify areas in which they will need additional training.

Dr. Michael Roberto, author of “Know What You Don’t Know — How Great Leaders Prevent Problems Before They Happen”, wrote that cardiac units in the United Kingdom began training nurses with skills that, before, had only been provided to doctors. This training helped them spot the indications of a pending heart attack for high-risk patients in cardiac units.

These nurses became more effective in summoning rapid response teams, which would intervene to save the patient’s life, if necessary. These rapid response teams performed highly effective medical tests and procedures to help save the patient. Thus, the additional training for nurses was extremely effective and quickly spread to hospitals around the world.

Medical professionals in Australia made one minor adjustment when implementing this concept. While relatively simple, it saved numerous lives. Aside from calling the rapid response team when they saw indicators of a pending heart attack, they were also told to do so whenever a patient did not behave similarly to other patients with comparable medical conditions, based on the nurses’ experience.

Simply put, they were trained to look for odd behaviors and then act on their gut feeling.

It was of great importance that the nurses were told they would not be penalized for false alarms. This gave the nurses the freedom to trust their own judgment and intuition. Errors become learning moments. This additional training, combined with empowering nurses to trust their instincts, reduced mortality in cardiac units by as much as 50 percent.

Now You Know

The use of “The First 30 Seconds” provides a powerful tool for directors and supervisors to increase their drivers’ confidence in handling whatever may happen in and around their buses. It is based on sound research and has been proven in the field. Best of all, if your fleet does not have the funds to purchase the program, it can be replicated at no cost to you but your time. All you would need to do is create the scenarios and discussion points yourself.

How you use the program isn’t important, but using the program, or a similarly structured one, is.

Your drivers, and their precious passengers, are too important to do anything else.

Stephen Satterly, II, is a senior analyst with Safe Havens International. He is also a researcher and author. He can be reached at stephencsatterly2@gmail.com.